Large scale child labour persists in India, mostly in the agricultural sector and the informal economy despite initiatives by the government and instances of commercial sexual exploitation of minors are oft reported, a US report on the issue said on Wednesday. According to the India section of the annual report of the Department of Labor, children are exploited in the worst forms of child labour with a majority working in agriculture,...

A Dalit-dominated hamlet in remote area of Uttar Pradesh (UP) is on the radar of top officials of the Mayawati administration nowadays. At the crux of their interest is a new goddess ‘Angrezi Devi’. Construction of a temple consecrated to this goddess of English is in full swing in Jang Bahadur Ganj village of Lakhimpur Kheri district. But tension has already begun to simmer over this unique campaign to popularise English...

Government policy towards school education is schizophrenic. While on the one hand, it is working on rules to set up, to begin with, 2,500 public private partnership schools as a means to see how it can increase private sector involvement in providing education to the underprivileged (economically or socially) in a bigger way; on the other, it is all set to virtually nationalise elementary education in the country through the...

KEY TRENDS   • In 2017-18, 24.8 percent of rural working-age men and 74.5 percent of rural working-age (viz. 15-59 years) women were not employed. In urban areas, 25.8 percent of working-age men and 80.2 percent of working-age women were not employed AB   • Both the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) and the Consumer Pyramids Survey of the Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy (CMIE-CPDX) report the overall unemployment rate to be around 6 per cent in 2018,...